Item: 1 white plastic mug with my name on it
I don't remember what the occasion was, but one of my kindergarten teachers, who was of an artistic bent, gave mugs like this to everybody in our class. It's a small one, nothing like the super-size mugs we have now, but maybe that's appropriate for a gift to a child. I use it mostly for camping, since it's plastic and can't break. "Karen" is painted in blue brushstrokes across it.
One day last week I turned on my computer and had a Skype message from someone in Italy named Massimo, asking if I had ever been to Greece. It transpired that he was asking because at some point in the past he had met a flight attendant there named Karen, and they had left each other after what he described as "a gorgeous love story." Now, he was trying to find her again by contacting everyone named Karen he could find within a certain geographic area.
As far as I know, nouns aren't usually capitalized in Italian, so I think when somebody writes something like "a few years ago I met a Girl by the name of Karen," he's making a statement.
I realized as I was getting near the bottom of this post that it was sounding like a hey-everyone-forward-this-heartwarming-email-to-30-friends kind of story. In actuality, my exchange with him was completely efficient and un-sappy. He seemed to have a good sense of how to get to the point, how much to say and when to quit. The whole thing took a trivial amount of time, 120 seconds maybe. The thing about Internet use is that content consisting of events in a stranger's life gets thrown at you in the same frame as discount pharmaceuticals, petitions, rants, blonde jokes, 10 ways to tell if you're a real New Yorker. A number of questions come to mind here, the foremost of which is: Should I have been more invested or less invested in what he was telling me?
Anyway, searching for ex-lovers can have all sorts of outcomes, but I guess you can't find out which way it's going to go without trying. Insofar as it's possible to do so for a stranger over the Internet, based on a 3-sentence description of a situation, I wished him well.
One day last week I turned on my computer and had a Skype message from someone in Italy named Massimo, asking if I had ever been to Greece. It transpired that he was asking because at some point in the past he had met a flight attendant there named Karen, and they had left each other after what he described as "a gorgeous love story." Now, he was trying to find her again by contacting everyone named Karen he could find within a certain geographic area.
As far as I know, nouns aren't usually capitalized in Italian, so I think when somebody writes something like "a few years ago I met a Girl by the name of Karen," he's making a statement.
I realized as I was getting near the bottom of this post that it was sounding like a hey-everyone-forward-this-heartwarming-email-to-30-friends kind of story. In actuality, my exchange with him was completely efficient and un-sappy. He seemed to have a good sense of how to get to the point, how much to say and when to quit. The whole thing took a trivial amount of time, 120 seconds maybe. The thing about Internet use is that content consisting of events in a stranger's life gets thrown at you in the same frame as discount pharmaceuticals, petitions, rants, blonde jokes, 10 ways to tell if you're a real New Yorker. A number of questions come to mind here, the foremost of which is: Should I have been more invested or less invested in what he was telling me?
Anyway, searching for ex-lovers can have all sorts of outcomes, but I guess you can't find out which way it's going to go without trying. Insofar as it's possible to do so for a stranger over the Internet, based on a 3-sentence description of a situation, I wished him well.
posted by Karen at 9:16 PM
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